What's Going On

First, the good news:

After being socked in for large parts of Monday and Tuesday, my brain has been fairly fog-free for the past couple of days. There are still moments, mind you, but for the most part, the synapses are firing again (although the words "cranberry juice" eluded me for several long seconds over dinner tonight).

Also, I got to spend time with a couple of out-of-town pals yesterday (hi, Heather!) and today (hi, Steve!), and that was a tremendous treat.

Second, the less good news:

The hair thing is driving me crazy. Remember a few weeks ago when I couldn't figure out whether I was nauseated or not, and I didn't want to eat anything until I was sure I wasn't? Well, now I can't figure out if my hair is really, truly falling out or not, and I haven't wanted to get it buzzed until I knew for sure. It's like some perverse game of chicken—I don't want to cut it all off unless it's about to come out anyway.

Normally, I would have gone to get it buzzed right away, but the fates intervened. You see, Dave, my gifted stylist (and champion buzz-cutter), doesn't work on Sundays or Mondays, so when my hair first started coming out in the shower on Sunday, I knew I'd have to wait until at least Tuesday to deal with it. When Tuesday came and it hadn't all fallen out, I started thinking that maybe it was just thinning—thinning very aggressively, but still just thinning. And then it turned out that Dave was out sick, so I was stuck in limbo a little longer. Meanwhile, I've been shedding all over the place (putting our cats to shame, by the way) and having this strange sort of existential crisis to boot.

Now it's Thursday night, and I've had several shower scenes worthy of their own horror film, but there's still a decent amount (not a lot, but still a decent amount) of hair on my head (and on my pillow and on my scarf and on the bathroom floor, but still). So I'm still not sure if it's really all coming out, but I'm probably going to see Dave tomorrow and come home looking like G.I. Jane.

And if that's not enough, there's the food thing. Pretty much everything—up to and including bottled water—tastes terrible to me right now. Imagine a coat of paste on your tongue (yum!) and you'll have a sense of what's it like. But that's only half the fun. The other half is that pretty much everything I eat "disagrees" with me. (Gotta love those euphemisms!) And, lest you forget, I remain an incorrigibly picky eater.

So the chances of my having a meal (or a snack or a beverage) that a) I like, and b) likes me, and c) actually tastes good?

Really, really small.

Infinitesimal.

Practically non-existent.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it's fair to say that I am a bit of a mess right now, functioning synapses or no.

But I did wear my new fedora for the first time today, and it looked pretty damn cool. (Even if I looked a bit like a refugee from a 1940s film noir. . . .)